a solemn pause – the films of gregory j. markopoulos

This first program brings together a selection of early films that on the one hand mark Markopoulos' transition from his home in Toledo and place of study California to New York, and on the other hand, each in its own way, express the unconscious urge of (homoerotic) desire in conflict with violent, repressive ideas of gender and sexuality. Flowers of Asphalt, which contains footage from Markopoulos' destroyed earlier film Jackdaw and from Christmas U.S.A. and features his siblings and parents, is centered around an allegorical approach to (his) coming out. In contrast, the film Eldora, shot on 8mm two years later, focuses on a female teenager who meets a boy in the desolate wasteland of Ohio. Dreamlike, with “hesitant and agonizingly slow movement” (Markopoulos), an ambivalent, swampy, cloudy love encounter is loosely hinted at. Swain, in which Markopoulos takes the lead role, is an exploration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe, in particular the figure of the self-sufficient and independent stranger, a “gentle evocation, conveyed through images and visual symbols, of a subconscious rejection of socially expected masculine stereotypes. This rejection takes the form of an escape – a fantastic escape from what is visually perceived as crude, repulsive sexuality, into the pure clarity of artistic creation, nature and the untouched individual personality” (Donald Weinstein). Finally, Twice a Man from 1963 is in many ways a turning point in Markopoulos' filmmaking. Shot in New York, it is a loose adaptation of the Hippolytus legend and already hints at his later vision of film as film through the condensed concentration on flashes of individual frames, which Markopoulos also calls “film phrases” or “thought images” and associates with Joyce's literary method of the stream of consciousness.

Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. Prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.

The film as a mimesis of the human mind. The torrent of single or multiple frames is made analogous to the thoughts and feelings of the character when Markopoulos departs from a myth or novel, or to those of the filmmaker when he portrays people or places. Himself as Herself condenses Balzac’s Séraphîta in a single body, Seraphita/Seraphitus, female/male, a hermaphrodite whose dual condition is resolved in their angelic and ecstatic ascension to Swedenborgian heaven. In the film, it is a journey from the unconscious to consciousness and from science to religion. The Norwegian fjords are transformed into thirteen scenes/locations—mansions and gardens of Boston, the city as mental objectification. Markopoulos combines trance with mythopoeia in this story of erotic-identitary self-denial and introspective assimilation. He contrasts bodily immobility with the alternation of costumes (black tuxedo or blue sari) and the colorful transforming sensuality of the hieroglyphic-objects (a fan, a ring, a letter, a hairpin, embalmed birds and a live parrot). Facing the gestural ambiguity (an invisible embrace, an open heart, unknown hands and lips that caress and kiss during sleep) our psychophysiological understanding of the intermittency of the montage softens recollections, intertwinings and anticipations typical of a dual consciousness full of intrusive thoughts and obsessive contradictions. The chromatic orchestration also converges in Bliss (blue-white and brown) and Ming Green (red-orange and fir green) with the syncopated meter. Edited in camera, time crystallizes in the fades and superimpositions around the doorsteps, chiaroscuros and frescoes of the church of Saint John the Baptist in Hydra (Bliss) and the filmmaker’s apartment in Greenwich Village, converted with each beat-pulse into a memento, a rêverie, an interior garden (Ming Green). The objects (curtains, bookcase, chair, flower, family photos) reverberate as they do in the simultaneous montage of Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill, a mosaic portrait of the dancer, poet and painter through canvas, photos, magazines and ballet programs, a kaleidoscopically re-composed life.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Many thanks to Robert Beavers and Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by Temenos Archive.

A particle of Time contains trillions of imprisoned images, Markopoulos wrote. The 33 portraits of writers, painters and filmmakers that compose Galaxie comprise the evocation of the past and the conjuration of a potential future. Reaching the end of each three-minute reel, the filmmaker closes the shutter, rewinds and begins a new composition, exposing some of his portrait reels up to ten times with fades, fragments of black and superimpositions of single or multiple frames. With each chisel strike, the cut on the stone reveals a new temporary layer in the combination of frontal, profile or oblique views. Singularizing the physical or personal attributes in his studies of heads, shoulders, and hands, Markopoulos moves from the group portrait of the intellectual community of Greenwich Village to the kaleidoscopic sculpture and artistic reality of the subject. Edited in the order of its shooting, the progressive photographic complexity of the portraits increases during the screening. The required static limitation of postures, expressions and facial microgestures (eyes, nose, ear, lip), as well as the viewer's participation in the camera's fixation, contrast with the serious, silent, stony faces, which with each new exposition grow like pulp and sometimes even metamorphose into a hexomat. The choice of décors (lamps and desks, Indian tapestries or zebra rugs), as well as the selection of the personal object that the honoree incorporates usually in the last shoot layer (photos, letters, paintings, toys, masks, crucifixes, rings) are naturally attributable to the portrayed subjects. In the last instants of each three-minute roll, we hear the metallic knocks of a Hindu bell, increasing with each new portrait until reaching the thirtieth. Announcing their agonizing disappearances, all of them are fulminated in a definitive blackout.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.

Between 1986 and 1990, Markopoulos re/edited around 80 of his films into a serial-film of 22 cycles of approximately 80 hours. Reshaping almost all of his oeuvre, ENIAIOS, an Asclepian and Wagnerian work, was conceived to be seen on pilgrimage to Temenos (Arcadia). Over three consecutive days in 1970, he filmed three autonomous portraits, abandoning his use of superimpositions and mixing natural and artificial light: the painter and photographer David Hockney in his studio in London; the writer, collector and main promoter of cubism Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in his office in Paris, and the painter and writer Leonor Fini in her house in Paris. As the myth relocates itself in the interactions of the editing, he discovered that his film was effortlessly inspired by the legend of Faust: figures and surroundings became characters, moments became scenes, and the slightest gestures became revelations. Markopoulos kept fragments of Genius (which he never printed as a film) in Eniaios, disappearing the fade-ins and outs, positive or negative elements depending on the location and rhythm, replaced by phrases of black or clear leader. Also, in the Order III of ENIAIOS, Shapes of the Mouth, close-ups of the faces, hands, or feet from the always elegantly dressed painters and collagists Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore bring the characteristic Markopoulos photographic portrait immobility to its maximum power in the encounter of the fascinating living sculptures of Gilbert and George with the long intervals of black leader from Eniaios. The frequent single frames, distilled matrix of micro-instants and gestural transiences on the threshold of the visible, stripped of the illusion of movement, remain scattered like a handful of seeds, towards or against the other frames or the black leader. All the different harmonic units of this imaginative music contrast in the cumulative metric-rhythmic principles of montage between persistence and interruption, frequency acceleration and variational imagistic slowness. In the intervals lies the afterimage as determined by the intensity of color, as well as the quasi-hallucinated anticipation and remembrance, between telekinetic vision and eidetic memory—connections-figurations-illusions of new strokes-lines of movement—resurrection of the members of the portrayed.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )


Introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Robert Beavers and the Temenos Verein. The prints are provided by the Temenos Archive.